Arpan Roy is an anthropologist researching in the Middle East. He is currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin. He holds a PhD from the Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. His work is in close colloquy with themes of religion, ethics, language, psychoanalysis, and the experience of difference in the Arab world.

His upcoming book on Romani kinship in Palestine, titled Relative Strangers: Romani Kinship and Palestinian Difference will be published in 2024 by University of Toronto Press. It explores a model of alterity based on how memory, intergenerational transmission, and kinship work together in a way that is neither visible by obvious markers like race or religious difference, nor detectable by the antennas of the state. A second book project in progress is a co-edited multidisciplinary volume on plurality in Palestine that is the first book project of Insaniyyat—the Society of Palestinian Anthropologists.